Claude Monet was an artist who painted a lot. He was not very popular, until he painted The Gare Saint-Lazare. Immediately, the public started recognizing his art, and soon Monet gained the respect of a top art critic and one of the most famous authors at the time, Emile Zola. Mr. Zola wrote this review of Monet’s work:

Monsieur Claude Monet has the most distinctive personality of the Impressionists. He has exhibited some superb interiors of the railway station. You can hear the trains rumbling in, see the smoke billow up under the huge roofs . . . . That is where painting is today . . . . Our artists have to find the poetry in the train stations, the way their fathers found poetry in forest and rivers.

Monet’s place as one of the greatest painters became known more and more all over the country. Monet soon earned the nickname “The Painter Who Stopped the Trains.”